Today was a real fun day. We slept in again, and then saw Neil & Donna off to work. Drank coffee, caught up on email, and hung around with Neil Jr until about 10:00, then took Donna’s car to IHOP for brunch. We split a strawberry cream cheese crepe with eggs, bacon, sausage, & hash browns. Then it was off for the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Center.
The space center was great! We started with an Imax movie about the “Magnificent Desolation” of the Apollo missions to the moon. That was pretty good, and featured bits from people who worked at KSC as well as some of the astronauts who went on the missions. Then we started on the bus tour that dropped us off at three separate sites before returning to the main visitors area.
The first site was the Area 39 observation gantry. There we saw the crawler close up, and climbed stairs to see the 39A launch pad where they had the shuttle getting ready for Monday’s launch, and the 39B pad where the first Aries test rocket had been launched last week. We were still about 3 miles from the pad, but they had telescopes that gave you a good close-up view. We could see the top of the fuel tank, and just the very tip of the shuttle above the structure built up around the shuttle. I got a couple of pictures that I think will turn out OK even though they need a lot of cropping to zero in on the shuttle.
The next stop on the bus tour was the Apollo/Saturn V center. They showed a couple of movies about the Apollo program that were very interesting. The first one detailed the early Apollo launches including Apollo 4 where the fire killed three astronauts. The second was about the first Lunar orbit mission. We then went out to the exhibit area where they had one of the Saturn V rockets. We knew the Saturn V was a big rocket, but you have no idea how huge they are until you’re right up next to one. Each of the five engine outlets must be near 20 feet in diameter; very impressive. We also got to actually touch a moon rock that they had on display, also very cool.
The last stop on the bus tour was at the Space Station production center. We got to walk through mock-ups of some of the rooms on the station, and then went over to view the ‘clean room’. There wasn’t anything going on there, though, as it was after 4:30 (and Veterans’ Day).
When the bus dropped us off at the main visitor area, we went over to the Explorer Shuttle. That was probably the highlight of the visit. They had ramps leading up to areas that were cut away with observation platforms right inside the shuttle. The first level allowed viewing a storage area under the flight deck and the main shuttle bay. They had a satellite sitting in there as when preparing for deployment. The second deck gave a good look into the actual flight deck as well as a higher up view of the shuttle bay.
From there we went to the “Rocket Garden” where they had Redstone, Atlas, and other rockets standing up. They also had Mercury and Gemini capsules that you could climb into. Of course we had to have someone take our picture in the Gemini capsule – it actually turned out pretty good! We also saw a whole bunch of middle school kids who were on some kind of scavenger hunt for the answers to a sheet of questions their teacher had given them. They were having a great time!
It was almost 6:30 before we got back to Neil & Donna’s. Neil grilled steaks on the grill, and Donna sautéed mushrooms, onions & green peppers, and made garlic Texas toast. The delicious meal was topped off by apple pie and ice cream.
Neil & Donna are off to Anchorage at 5:00 tomorrow morning, so we all called it an early night.